Saturday

TAUNTON – Mayor Tom Hoye still remembers driving by Carpenter’s Glen in East Taunton in the 1990s when it was just a bunch of “holes in the ground.”

The property had been foreclosed on and the private developer had halted construction and abandoned the project with just the foundations poured.

Hoye kept wondering what would happen to the place.

He soon found out.

“South Shore Housing came to the rescue and it’s been a godsend to the city,” Hoye said at a ribbon cutting Wednesday to celebrate the completion of a major renovation of Carpenter’s Glen.

Back in the 1990s, South Shore Housing, a non-profit housing organization now known as Housing Solutions, built 32 affordable apartments there, as well as a group residence for Department of Mental Health clients.

The original development also included 70 single-family owner-occupied houses adjacent to the townhouses. A portion of those were also designated as affordable.

But that was a long time ago and about five years ago, it because clear the apartments could use a major overhaul, Housing Solutions Executive Director Carl Nagy-Koechlin said.

The Taunton renovation included new roofs; rebuilt front and back porches; new windows; new exterior siding; energy-saving insulation; new high-efficiency boilers; updated kitchens and bathrooms; and a new playground.

And as part of the project, for the first time, eight of the townhouses were set aside for very low income people, including formerly homeless families, with subsidized, sliding scale rents.

“We really understand deeply how difficult it is for working families to find a place to live in the communities where they’ve grown up and want to remain a part of,” Undersecretary of the State Department of Housing and Community Development Chrystal Koregay said at the ribbon cutting.

The total project cost was $8 million – which includes the cost of the Carpenter’s Glen renovation as well as a simultaneous overhaul to a Housing Solutions development in Wareham.

Nagy-Koechlin said the project got off the ground a couple of years ago with $245,000 in Community Development Block Grant money through the mayor’s office of Economic and Community Development.

Hoye said it was great to see all the hard work pay off on such a worthy project. He said he first met Nagy-Koechlin at a late night City Council meeting as they worked to assure the funding would be in place.

“Let’s continue this journey together,” Hoye said Wednesday.

In addition to the local funding, the project was paid for with state and federal grants, as well as a $3 million mortgage Housing Solutions will repay with rents collected, Nagy-Koechlin said.

State Sen. Marc Pacheco, D. Taunton, said Thursday he remembers working on the initial project in the 1990s when he was assistant to then-mayor Dick Johnson.

“There is a need for affordable housing particularly today when the income gap between the haves and have-nots has never been greater and working class citizens who get up every day and go to work have to struggle to find a place to live,” Pacheco said.

Mark Cook sees that struggle every day.

He is the director of The Matthew Mission at First Parish Church in Taunton, a community outreach center that focuses on helping homeless people, the working poor, veterans, the elderly – anyone in need, he said.

Right now, there are six or seven families with children living out of their cars in Taunton, Cook said.

In one case, the father works full-time and the mother spends her days in the library with their younger child, while the older child is in school, Cook said.

“High rents are doing people in. Working families are becoming homeless families,” said Cook, whose day job is as a disaster captain for the Red Cross.

He can provide families with a warm place to spend the day and vouchers for food and clothing. But he wishes he could do more.

“It makes me feel helpless. When I see them walk away, I feel terrible. The system is definitely broken,” Cook said.

Nagy-Koechlin said Massachusetts has a “Right to Shelter” law that is supposed to guarantee emergency housing be provided to families with children – be it in a shelter or hotel – but too many families fall through the cracks.

Courtney Morris, a single mother of two, will be moving into one of the subsidized units at Carpenter’s Glen this weekend.

Morris, who has been living in a shelter in Fall River, told the officials gathered what secure, affordable housing means to her. Now, she can sleep at night without fear. Now, she can work for a better life for herself and her children.

A place to call home is the foundation on which she can build, she said.

“It’s almost as if she was saying, ‘Now, that I have a place to live, the sky’s the limit’,” Nagy-Koechlin said.

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